Oasis or Mirage? Local Representation and Political Trust among Latinos

• In Event: Limits on Urban Inclusiveness: Representation and Historical Inequalities

Abstract

Scholars of African American politics find descriptive representation to have a meaningful effect on the way African Americans view the political world (Gay, 2002; Tate, 2003; Bobo and Gilliam, 1990; Banducci et al., 2005). The extant literature exploring the impact of descriptive representation suggests that historically disadvantaged groups can become politically empowered by becoming more engaged and connected to government when represented by a co-ethnic. However, there are mixed findings about the effects of descriptive representation and levels of political trust in government and whether patterns emerge depending on the levels of government discussed. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Postelection Study (CMPS), I find that across all racial and ethnic groups, trust in local government is notably higher than trust in government at the federal level. Is this due to the perceptions that the federal government is too distant, or does it have to do with a perceived intimate connection to local elected officials?
To examine attitudes about local government, I use data from the 2020 CMPS, the largest multiracial and multilingual survey across multiple states and regions in a presidential election. I focus on Latino respondents, in particular, because of their increased presence in the electorate. I then appended data from the 2023 Latino Legislative Database Project and other sources to identify the effect of descriptive representation. It is also particularly important to focus on local level Latino elected officials as 6,501 (94.5%) of the 6,881 total Latino elected officials in the country in 2020 were elected at the local level. Of those local elected officials 2,042 (31.4 %) were elected to city councils. Given that such a large segment of all Latino elected officials is elected to this level of office, if this is consequential for trust local government, it could be an oasis in American democracy. However, if the effects of local descriptive representation are muted, it is possible that the expectation of the effect of this representation is simply a mirage.

Author

• Ricardo Ramirez, University of Notre Dame